I turned my phone off during my counseling session on Tuesday. When I was done, I turned it on and had a text from M. I answered it, and later called him to follow up.
I text him “I hope you sleep in the bed tonight – I have missed you.” When he comes home, he hugs me nicely.
We’re both sitting on the couch while dinner cooks, I’m filling him in on a bunch of work news. We eat dinner. I tease him a little about getting misty-eyed at an episode of Doctor Who, especially considering he never ever cries. He takes an extraordinary, out-of-proportion amount of offense at my teasing.
Our boy asks if he can say the word ‘damned’, because he doesn’t like to say bad words. I tell him it depends on the sentence he’s saying it in, and thank him for asking first. I explain if it refers to a group or situation that’s in peril or beyond hope, then that’s the appropriate non-swearing usage. M says, ‘You know, like my marriage is damned.’ – and laughs. I die a little. (I die a little more writing it down in this post.) (I die even more wondering what on earth my son thought he meant.)
We’re watching something together online, he falls asleep and so instead of pestering him to stay awake, I stop the show and turn the computer off. He gets mad, thinking I’m mad at him for falling asleep when actually I’m just turning it off so I don’t have to keep him awake and we can watch it later. I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.
When I come out, he’s got my phone, scrolling through call records and texts. “Looking for something in particular?”
He thinks that because he couldn’t reach me, because he didn’t know I had a counseling appointment, because I didn’t answer his text, that I was out fucking someone else. He says our whole marriage dynamic is my fault. I created this situation, he says. I don’t take initiative to fix it, he says.
We barely spoke yesterday. My daughter slept in the bed with me last night.
We fell asleep listening to African lullabies.
